It is said that words are like people: One can encounter them daily yet never come to know their true selves. This volume examines what words are—how they exist—in religious phenomena. Going beyond the common idea that language merely describes states of mind, beliefs, and intentions, the book looks at words in their performative and material specificity.
The contributions in the volume develop the insight that our implicit assumptions about what language does guide the way we understand and experience religious phenomena. They also explore the possibility that insights about the particular status of religious utterances may in turn influence the way we think about words in our language.
- Cover
- Half-Title
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Any More Deathless Questions?
- PART I: WHAT ARE WORDS?
- 1.Word as Act: Varieties of Semiotic Ideology in the Interpretation of Religion
- 2.Medieval Irish Spells: “Words of Power” as Performance
- 3.Inscriptional Violence and the Art of Cursing: A Study of Performative Writing
- 4.Words and Word-Bodies: Writing the Religious Body
- 5.Flesh Become Word: Textual Embodiment and Poetic Incarnation
- PART II: RELIGIOUS VOCABULARIES
- 6.Semantic Differences, or “Judaism”/“Christianity”
- 7.The Name God in Blanchot
- 8.Humanism’s Cry: On Infinity in Religion and Absence in Atheism—A Conversation with Blanchot and Nancy
- 9.Intuition, Interpellation, Insight: Elements of a Theory of Conversion
- 10.Allowed and Forbidden Words: Canon and Censorship in Grundbegriffe, Critical Terms, Encyclopedias: Confessions of a Person Involved
- PART III: TRANSMITTING AND TRANSLATING THE IMPLICIT
- 11.God Lisped: Divine Accommodation and Cracks in Calvin’s Scriptural Voice
- 12.Rethinking the Implicit: Fragments of the Project on Aggada and Halakhah in Walter Benjamin
- 13.What Cannot Be Said: Apophasis and the Discourse of Love
- 14.Givenness and the Basic Problems of Phenomenology
- PART IV: SITUATING ONESELF VIA LANGUAGE
- 15.Prayer: Addressing the Name
- 16.A Quarrel with God: Cavell on Wittgenstein and Hegel
- 17.Thinking about the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics
- 18.The Rise of Literal-Mindedness
- 19.From Star Wars to Jediism: Th eEmergence of Fiction-based Religion
- 20.The Words of the Martyr: Media, Martyrdom, and the Construction of a Community
- PART V: RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE AND NATIONALISM
- 21.Militant Religiopolitical Rhetoric: How Abraham Kuyper Mobilized His Constituency
- 22.Thinking through Religious Nationalism
- Notes
- List of Contributors
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